​As we step into 2025, Lusis Payments is thrilled to announce a wave of new customers converting their legacy payment systems to our flagship solution, TANGO. This marks a significant milestone in our mission to transform the global payments landscape, providing cutting-edge technology and unparalleled adaptability to businesses worldwide.
 
Accelerating Growth in Retail
TANGO has seen tremendous growth in the retail industry, underscoring its ability to meet the sector's dynamic needs. As retailers face ever-evolving customer expectations and an increasingly competitive marketplace, TANGO’s advanced architecture is proving to be a critical enabler of success. Its flexibility and scalability empower retail clients to deliver seamless, secure, and efficient payment experiences that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.
 
The Robustness of TANGO
What sets TANGO apart is its robust microservices architecture, which provides a solid foundation for payments modernization. Unlike traditional monolithic systems, TANGO’s modular design allows businesses to implement updates and new features incrementally—minimizing downtime and reducing costs. This agility ensures our clients stay ahead of emerging trends and regulatory requirements while continuously enhancing their operations.
 
Adapting to a Changing Marketplace
The payments industry is in constant flux, with technological advancements and market demands evolving at an unprecedented pace. TANGO’s adaptability equips our clients with the tools to meet these challenges head-on. By offering tailored solutions and seamless integrations, TANGO ensures businesses can innovate rapidly while maintaining operational stability.
 
Success Stories of TANGO Adoption
The decision to embrace TANGO has yielded tangible results for our clients:

• Leading Global Bank: One of the world's largest financial institutions transitioned to TANGO, achieving a 50% reduction in total cost of ownership. The bank praised TANGO's superior agility and impressive cost savings, highlighting its ability to handle high transaction volumes with ease.
• Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) Implementation: A prominent North American bank adopted Lusis Payments' DCC solution, enhancing the customer experience for international cardholders. This implementation not only improved transparency and trust but also generated additional revenue streams for the bank.
• Global TANGO Expansion: Throughout 2024, TANGO expanded its presence worldwide, driven by strong advocacy from our client base. Clients have successfully migrated from legacy platforms like BASE24 and Postilion to TANGO, achieving better control and significant cost savings.

Why Clients Choose Lusis
The decision to transition to TANGO is about more than just technology; it’s about partnering with a trusted leader in payments innovation. With decades of expertise, Lusis Payments is committed to delivering future-proof solutions that not only meet today’s demands but anticipate tomorrow’s opportunities.
 
Looking Ahead
As we welcome new clients to the Lusis family, we’re excited to see how TANGO will continue to reshape the payments ecosystem. From enhancing efficiency to driving growth in retail and beyond, TANGO remains at the forefront of payments technology—delivering unmatched value to our clients.

“Do you take plastic?”
 
There was a time when consumers were asking that question in Retail outlets around the world. Nowadays, the ability to pay for goods and services with a debit or credit card is so commonplace that consumers simply assume that card acceptance is available virtually everywhere.
 
It wasn’t always like this but several decades of investment has built the card payment infrastructure to its current state. However, despite the continued growth in consumer payment transactions, card payments does have its drawbacks.
 
The level of fees paid by merchants has been a long standing area of contention, often resulting to protracted legal action to enforce greater billing transparency and reductions in overall fee costs. Another area of serious concern is the dramatic increase in card and account fraud, clearly aggravated by consumer behavior changes during the pandemic. Of course, the quest for ever simpler and more secure payment options is of great interest to many consumers.
 
There has been a lot of payments innovation over the years including stored value cards, digital wallets, and bio-metric authentication. However, many of these schemes piggyback on the card infrastructure or achieve only limited levels of success. In most industries technology has been reinventing itself at accelerating rates but this is not the case with card payments. This begs the question – “Is the card itself the bottleneck to change?”
 
Putting aside the entire settlement cycle there are several key elements that a truly alternative consumer payments option needs to address. Firstly, the consumer needs to have some form of payment token and authentication method. Additionally, the alternate payment scheme needs to ensure the secure acquisition and routing of the payment to the appropriate institution for authorization.
 
The advent of smartphones and wearable computing, coupled with the growth of real time account to account payments is already proving to be an interesting possible alternative to card payments. Some adoption rate projections suggest that account-based payments could notionally obsolete card-based payments.
 
It seems that the real hurdle to obsoleting card payments is a commercial issue, not a technical one. As long as the new entrants into the consumer payments market all seek their own “magic bullet” then they are most likely to be left nibbling around the market share of the traditional card brands. The last thing consumers want is to be drip-fed an endless array of different payment options with no clear indication of convergence and interoperability. 
 
The electric car market provides a great comparison in this regard. In an age of climate change and excessive wastage it seems obvious that governments should demand all electric cars sold in their country to have the same charging connection. The cost and timescales to create an effective charging stations infrastructure is immediately reduced, and consumers would have greater confidence to switch to electric cars. I have no doubt that were the governments of a few of the major market countries to take this bold step it would be universally applauded and the card manufacturers would deliver the requisite standards in a heart beat.
 
The US market saw a strong consortium of banks cooperate in the launch of Zelle as a competitive counter to Venmo. However, the really big question is whether the banks, Fintechs, and Retailers can cooperate to deliver a single, ubiquitous consumer payments option that can move us beyond the 70 years history of plastic cards.

In today’s highly competitive Retail Payments market, there is no margin for error. To be successful, payments organizations need the very best technology, the right skills and experience, and the commercial agility to rapidly exploit any opportunities. It is a fact of business-life that all organizations have their ups and downs. However, the smart organizations continually pay attention to the critical factors that reduce the likelihood of ‘nasty surprises’, while also creating the best chances for accelerated success.

A simple ‘roll the dice’ strategy cannot ensure a future of strong growth, even if that’s how you have always ‘played’ before. The availability of powerful payment solutions like TANGO, the effectiveness of DevOps and Agile methodologies, and the perpetual shift in consumer demands are combining in a perfect storm. Unless of course, your organization can transform itself to thrive in this new era of Retail Payments.

Interestingly, the humble "Snakes ‘n Ladders" game provides a great metaphor for the ups and downs of a modern Retail Payments business.

SEEK COMPOUNDING GAINS
Fortunately, some business gains lead directly to further gains with a significant amplification of the overall benefits. Being more competitive comes from being able to learn and change more quickly than your competition. Using the TANGO micro-services payments suite delivers all the flexibility and commercial agility you need. This is clearly a crucial benefit. Additionally, with TANGO you can reduce your time and costs for compliance, support a wider range of consumer payments types, and easily form new business partnerships for accelerated growth. One ‘ladder’ leads to another, and another. Lucky dice throws aren’t guaranteed - but smart planning can, and does, make them more likely.